(by Manuela Correra)
A new algorithm could indicate tailored care for women with breast cancer. The discovery is from the European Institute of Oncology (IEO) in Milan, which has identified a model for predicting the individual risk of metastasis to personalize therapies. The results of the study, supported by the AIRC Foundation, were presented at the congress of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), where good news also comes on the treatment front with new data on the effectiveness of immunotherapy.
The IEO model created, the researchers say, could become a guide for oncologists, to guide the therapeutic choices patient by patient, avoiding both the 'over' and under-treatment in post-surgical therapies, and is based on the combination genomic predictor, or a group of genes that form a 'molecular signature', with two clinical parameters: lymph node status and tumor size.
The result was excellent: tested on over 1800 patients enrolled in the IEO, the model showed that its ability to estimate the risk of recurrence within 10 years of diagnosis is higher than the commonly used clinical pathological parameters. The StemPrintER biomarker is the first and still the only tool capable of indicating the degree of "stem" present in primary breast cancer, ie the number and aggressiveness of cancer stem cells.
The results of our study represent a further step towards the goal we have been pursuing for years: to give each patient the best therapy for her and her illness - says Paolo Veronesi, director of the IEO Senology Program and Associate Professor at the University degli Studi di Milano - Thanks to the multidisciplinary approach and the close interaction between research and clinic, personalized medicine is finally becoming a reality also for breast cancer ".
But from Asco, new hopes also come on the therapy front. For triple negative breast cancer, the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab - which aims to awaken the immune system against cancer - in combination with chemotherapy, reduced the risk of disease progression by 35%.
The data from the phase 3 study KEYNOTE-355 demonstrate this. Every year in Italy about 8,000 women are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer (15% of the total diagnoses of breast cancer), the most aggressive and difficult to cure form. Immunotherapy is now opening important perspectives for these patients.
But to have an increasing weight, as evidenced by the latest scientific evidence, is also the diet. A large American study that has followed thousands of women for over 10 years, presented at the congress, has shown that higher plant protein intake is associated with a significantly lower risk of breast cancer and also a lower risk of death after breast cancer.
In contrast, higher animal protein intake was associated with a significantly higher risk of breast cancer incidence, but not mortality.
